The battle for the future of the Open Web is taking place as a new document model merges into a platform for highly graphical, interactive and information rich applications. Open source communities vie with dominant vendors Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Nokia and Google to stake out their claims as open source innovations collide with standards consortia and proprietary alternatives.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

excerpt: "Once upon a time, Microsoft bestrode the software world like a ruthless cartoon villain, gobbling up rivals and defying pleas for restraint from regulators. But the once-impregnable giant has now been humbled: following an acrimonious 10-year anti-trust battle with European regulators, Microsoft on Wednesday finally agreed to open its Windows operating system to rival web browsers in Europe."
Great opening line! But they get the story wrong. Woefully wrong! Just the opposite is happening. Microsoft has moved from the browser Web application to the Web itself. It's the platform stupid!!!
No one understands platform better than Microsoft. Control the platform's base formats, protocols, interfaces and internal messaging system, and you control all applications, services and devices using that platform.
The problem for Microsoft has been that the Web is a platform used by all, but owned by none. It's based on open standards that no one owns or controls. So as the Web evolves into a universal platform for converged communications, content and collaborative computing, Microsoft was facing the one fate every monopolist fears - having to compete on a level playing field!
While it took them well over ten years to come up with a counter strategy and effective implementation, Microsoft has finally achieved the impossible. They have carved out a huge section of the Open Web for their proprietary and exclusive use.

Thursday, December 03, 2009

I posted two lengthy comments here. Can't see the forest for all the trees is the idiom that comes to mind.
excerpt: With Silverlight, Microsoft continues to make it clear that they intend to use this web application framework, which they developed, to power much of what they are doing on the web going forward. Again, the problem here is that not only does Microsoft control this, but it requires a plug-in to use. Sure, they've made the plug-in available to most browsers, including the ones by rivals Google and Apple, but it's still a plug-in. It's something that's going to stop everyone from seeing the same web no matter which browser they use.
This has of course long been an issue with Microsoft. Despite a clear shift within the rest of the industry toward web standards, Microsoft long played difficult with its Internet Explorer browser. They could afford to, and maybe you could even argue that it was in their interest to, because they were so dominant. It was only when a standards-based browser, Mozilla's Firefox, started biting off significant chunks of IE's market share that Microsoft shifted their position to play more nicely with standards.

"We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites," wrote a Google spokesman in an e-mail.